Hey. It's Me, Egg. I Was Framed.
I have been around since before the dinosaurs. Long before chickens, long before humans, long before anyone had opinions about breakfast. I have outlasted every extinction event except, apparently, the 1968 American Heart Association dietary guidelines.
Here is what I actually am. I contain every vitamin a human body needs except vitamin C, every essential amino acid, complete protein. I come in my own packaging. I am the fastest, cheapest, most nutritionally complete food in human history, and I have been doing this since the Carboniferous.
In the 1500s, Spanish colonizers were building stone churches in the Philippines and the mortar kept failing — too much heat, too many earthquakes. So they mixed egg whites into it. Not a little. Millions of eggs, across three centuries, paid for by parishes and carried to construction sites by women and children. The purchase records are still there: Bacaor, Cavite, 1808. Again in 1824. Four of those churches are now UNESCO World Heritage Sites. They are still standing. The leftover yolks had nowhere to go, so they went into the cooking. That's where leche flan comes from. I built the churches and invented dessert. I mention this only for context.
In 692 AD, the Council of Trullo decided that Lent meant no eggs. Meat is flesh; flesh must be sacrificed; I come from an animal; close enough. Nobody asked me. The hens kept laying anyway — they didn't know, they're hens. People boiled me so I wouldn't go off, dyed me, handed me to children. That's where Easter eggs come from, actually. I was punished, I accumulated, I became the central object of one of the most beloved springtime traditions in the Western world... Yet the holiday is named after a Germanic goddess of dawn. Not after me. I am in the name of the egg. I am not in the name of the holiday.
And then, in 1968, a man went on American television and told everyone I was killing them.
The studies were done on rabbits. Rabbits don't metabolize dietary cholesterol — their bodies have no mechanism for it. Researchers fed them pure cholesterol and watched their arteries clog. Then they blamed me. People started pouring my yolk down the sink. Thirty years later, scientists confirmed that the human liver self-regulates for dietary cholesterol. The guidelines were quietly updated. The egg white omelet is still on the menu.
Nobody said sorry.
There should have been a formal apology. On television, same channel, same time slot. A retraction in every newspaper that ran the original story. A monument — not to the chicken, the chicken had nothing to do with it — to the yolk, specifically. And the rabbit should be required to issue a statement acknowledging that it is not a useful model for human cholesterol metabolism, and that it is sorry for its role in all of this.
The rabbit knows what it did.
Let this record reflect what actually happened. That is all.
Chiara wrote this with Claude. The grievances are hers. The typing is shared.